Grimmburg

On Tuesday I left my cozy little Munich and caught a train or two out to the city Marburg, in the state of Hessen. Marburg is a nice little German town, with about 80,000 residents and 20,000 students. There’s a saying in Marburg that a lot of cities have universities but Marburg is a university. Coming from Gainesville, which is nearly half student, it’s not a big deal to me but it’s nonetheless very nice place. The Brothers Grimm were very active in this area and they are quite proud of that, so in keeping with my tradition of renaming “burgs” after who they boast, I may just refer to Marburg as Grimmburg.

I’m here for a 6-week language and culture prep course for 38 (about half) of the Fulbright recipients to Germany. We started our Marburg adventure with a two-day orientation mostly with the Fulbright people just giving us tips on life in Germany and then we were thrown to the staff at the university who will be running the actual course. There was a lot of PowerPoint and a lot of eating but it was pretty fun.
The treatment we’ve been getting from the University of Marburg and Fulbright in general has been pretty fantastic. Really, it was all this that gave me the first inkling that maybe Fulbright is indeed a big deal. Maybe. I mean, the President of the University had dinner with us our first night here, which is pretty cool since it’s a reasonably large university (about 20,000 students). I doubt Bernie meets with incoming Fulbrighters.

The language course started on Thursday and has been pretty sweet so far. They split us into four levels, and I got thrown into the third. I think the fourth level is for people who are nearly fluent but just need to improve some for their project, and the second level is for people that have studied some things before but maybe not fully, so our level is somehow sandwiched in between there. I think most of us have learned all the basics before, we just need a little help with some specific or advanced topics and need practice speaking and expanding our vocabulary. I feel pretty comfortable in this level, but I have been considering moving up just because I think if I am severely challenged I could learn a lot faster than if I’m mostly comfortable. We’ll see though, I’m going to ask my teacher(s) for advice first (yeah, we actually have two teachers that rotate).

My time here has been really fun though. One of the coolest parts of this orientation, that I didn’t even consider at first, has been just meeting all the other Fulbrighters. We come from all over in every sense: all over the US, every field imaginable, and every personality type… but everyone is really nice and we’ve been having fun getting to know each other. It’s this huge group of very nice, interesting, and smart people just clinging to each other because we really don’t know much else around here. One friend Keith (who comes from Southern California and is an opera singer) described the experience we’ve all been having as “what we thought college would be like” and it’s pretty accurate. It’s a really good experience though because at the end of these six weeks, we’re all going to have a bunch of contacts, which can (most importantly) translate into free lodging and tours of cities all over the country. It’s just been a fantastic time of networking and learning German. The only problem is we speak way too much English, although the members of my class have almost entirely agreed to start speaking German to each other from today on. It may suck for some of the people that aren’t able to understand but we’ll strike some balance.
My camera broke on me… I have no idea why or how but until I either get it fixed or just buy a new one I’ll probably be picture-less… I’m probably sadder than anyone else is about this since we’ve seen some pretty beautiful things. I have however been telling my friends to go picture crazy to make up for what I would have taken and they’ve been good sports about it. So, I’m really looking forward to getting some good German practice and experiencing more of Marburg and, of course, chronicling these experiences here.